Tucked inside the new Senate border deal is language that would allow President Biden to postpone wall-building, giving him a chance to avoid erecting any more barriers during this current term.
There are still hundreds of millions of dollars in wall money sitting unused that Congress passed in the Trump years. Under the law, Mr. Biden was supposed to use the money to build the wall over the next year or two.
The new deal senators unveiled Sunday pushed that spending deadline back until late 2028, giving Mr. Biden a way to avoid more construction in his current term.
“All this does is give the administration the ability to punt responsibility for border wall construction up to four years,” said Robert Law, director of the America First Policy Institute’s Center for Homeland Security and Immigration and a former senior official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The deal was negotiated by Sens. Chris Murphy, Connecticut Democrat; Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona independent; and James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican.
“It builds border wall,” Mr. Lankford said in a call with reporters Sunday night.
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In a summary of the legislation released by his office, Mr. Lankford said the proposal “provides $650 million to build and reinforce miles and miles of new border wall. It also withholds the majority of the wall money to be used during the next administration.”
Critics said that was misleading.
“It is disingenuous of Senator Lankford to imply that this bill contains new border wall funding when in fact all it does is move the existing balance forward so that [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas doesn’t have to build any more wall,” said Rosemary Jenks at the Immigration Accountability Project, which opposes the new deal.
The wall was the most prominent of former President Donald Trump’s campaign promises and one of his more visible successes during his term in office.
More than 450 miles of barrier were constructed on his watch, much of it replacing less effective fencing. He had plans to build nearly 300 more miles in a second term, but those hopes were dashed by Mr. Biden’s election triumph.
Mr. Biden, on the campaign trail in 2020, promised that “not another foot” of the wall would be built during his tenure, and he imposed a construction halt on his first day in office.
DOCUMENT: Border security deal summary
The result was to strand hundreds of millions of dollars in money Congress had already approved in its spending bills for fiscal years 2019, 2020 and 2021, but which Mr. Biden didn’t want to spend.
Over the last three years, he’s been in a tug-of-war with Congress, asking lawmakers to revoke the wall money and reuse it for other purposes. Congress refused.
Under the fiscal year 2019 spending bill, the administration had to spend the wall-building money by late last year. Mr. Mayorkas announced in October that he would comply with the law, effectively breaking Mr. Biden’s 2020 promise.
Mr. Mayorkas said his hand was forced by the deadline in the law, though his decision to waive iconic laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act to speed construction left Biden allies steaming.